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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22553383">An Unscripted Life</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and'>Celia_and</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Childbirth, Daddy Issues, Death of a Parent, Devoted Reylo, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fame, Fatal car accident, Fluff, Harry and Meghan move to Canada AU, Infidelity (not Reylo), Mommy Issues, Overflowing love, Paparazzi, Pregnancy, Reference to past fatal drug overdose/implied suicide, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey is Hollywood royalty, Smut, Soft sex, The first chapter is 90 percent angst, The second chapter is 90 percent fluff, Therapy, Twins, parenting</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 16:49:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,612</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22553383</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>That night, in bed, she murmurs words of warning as he trails kisses up her arms, and he whispers little replies.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"It’s hell, you know, the paparazzi."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"I know."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"You could have a life that’s yours, if you left me."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"I know."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"This is a bad idea."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"I need you."</em>
</p><p>----------</p><p>A "Harry and Meghan move to Canada" AU.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>82</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>512</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Theirs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erateini/gifts">Erateini</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This little fic is a gift for <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erateini">Erateini</a>, who has been nothing but entirely welcoming and lovely to me on Twitter. Thank you, dear, for your kindness and for the delicious prompt. 💛</p><p>This lovely moodboard is the work of the infinitely talented <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWaffleHouseTM/pseuds/SpaceWaffleHouseTM">SpaceWaffleHouseTM</a>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Ben suspects he knows the answer, but he asks her once anyway why she chose acting—why she didn’t opt for some normal-person profession that would’ve kept her out of the limelight. She tells him that a normal-person workplace doesn’t deserve to be subjected to her. She doesn’t really mean <em>her,</em> he knows: she means the trappings of fame that accompany her. Coworkers gawking. Clients wanting autographs. Only Hollywood is built to handle it. And her fame is mostly Hollywood’s fault, anyway, to begin with.</p><p>There’s another reason that she doesn’t admit to him, but he figures it out. She does it to keep her parents’ memory alive in the public mind. Every time she’s on the cover of People magazine or has a Vanity Fair profile, her parents’ names appear, right after “daughter of.” Arguably the greatest rock artist and actress of their generation. But the world’s memory is short. She’s decided it’s her responsibility to preserve their legacy. So she gets up at four a.m. to drive to sets, and she does press and goes to premiers without complaint, and she smiles and waves and gives pieces of herself to everyone who wants them.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>She’d already resolved, when they met, never to marry or have kids. She craved love, craved family, but she’d made her decision. No one should be saddled with the life that her husband or her children would have to lead. The scrutiny of every pair of eyes that she encounters. The constant feeling of being <em>hunted,</em> stalked by men with cameras. So she successfully guarded her heart, until she met Ben.</p><p>She loved him long before she admitted it. She thought that if she didn’t say the words they could pretend that this wasn’t <em>it,</em> this wasn’t the once-in-a-lifetime, head-over-heels, happily-ever-after <em>it</em> that she’d convinced herself she couldn’t have.</p><p>It takes him months to wear her down. It becomes a private joke between them: how often he asks her to marry him. “Please pass the salt, and will you marry me?” “What do you want to do this weekend? Marry me?” “The vet changed Rudy’s tick medication. Oh, and I forgot to mention, will you marry me?” She always laughs a reproving little laugh and shakes her head, but as time goes on, the no becomes more and more impossible.</p><p>The hardest is when they’re in bed. When she’s on her back, legs wrapped around him, he stops his thrusts <em>just</em> before she peaks and whispers cheekily, “If you want to come, you’ll have to marry me.” She groans in playful frustration and digs her heels into his ass and rocks underneath him, chasing after her orgasm, until he relents and kisses her and takes her there. <em>Yes, yes, yes, yes,</em> she chants. It’s not the yes they both need.</p><p>Soon her everlasting “no”s become a lie. She’s his, of course, and he’s hers. She should do the dutiful thing, the noble thing, the thing she’s been preparing for all her adult life. She should end it and let him find a humane life with an utterly normal person—a court clerk, maybe, or a dental hygienist. She hates the imaginary woman with a passionate fury. But she could handle that. It boils down to a single problem, really: if she sent him away, she would need to slice her heart down the middle so he could take his half. And then she would die.</p><p>So one morning when he opens the fridge and says, “The orange juice is almost out. Marry me?” she says yes.</p><p>It takes a second, before he realizes.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>That night, in bed, she murmurs words of warning as he trails kisses up her arms, and he whispers little replies.</p><p>
  <em>It’s hell, you know, the paparazzi.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>You could have a life that’s yours, if you left me.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>This is a bad idea.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I need you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I love you.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know.</em>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><hr/><p> </p><p>Their wedding is a capital-e Event. Ben thought he knew all about Events, after the time he’s spent in her life, but not like this. It’s a surreal experience, being briefed by security teams on the possible eventuality that a deranged stalker might use the occasion of their wedding to try to kill them. He must look as shell-shocked as he feels, because the security consultant reassures him: “It’s routine. Comes with the territory.”</p><p>Ben isn’t a complete stranger to fame, of course. His music has gained an audience, and he’s occasionally stopped on the street by a fan or has his photo taken unawares. But he can go about his life without fear. That’s the main difference, between his world and hers.</p><p>It’s only in total darkness, in bed late at night with the room-darkening curtains absolutely closed, that she talks about her parents, and about the night when she was woken up from a dream and told that her daddy was dead. That the car he was in had gone off the road in Hollywood Hills, down into a ravine. <em>Paparazzi,</em> they’d said. She was young enough that she didn’t know to connect the word with the crowds of men with cameras. It sounded like a cartoon villain. And for a long time she’d hated the sallow, mustachioed, evil man she imagined had made her daddy die.</p><p>The news had rocked the world. A rock legend extinguished in a fiery inferno. America’s sweetheart, now a grieving widow. Their heartrendingly adorable daughter. Rey says bitterly that she’s surprised there hasn’t been a trashy, overwrought biopic about it yet. Maybe they’re just waiting for her to be old enough to play the role of her mom.</p><p>She tells him once that she’s always had the sneaking suspicion that that’s how she’ll go too. A car in pursuit and a faulty guardrail and a freefall to eternity. Ben doesn’t sleep that night, so he can hold her.</p><p>She never talks about the other part. The part about how it wasn’t just her father and his bandmate in the car; there was a woman the tabloids said was her father’s mistress. Or the part about how her mother fatally overdosed on sleeping pills four years later.</p><p>Some things even total darkness can’t make it okay to say.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s the only thing they ever fight about: how much of herself she gives away. She never says no, not to film roles or publicity or anything that will make someone see her and remember her parents. Even after she gets pregnant.</p><p>It’s about a year after the wedding. They’re getting ready for bed and her period is late, so she decides to take a test. He sits on the edge of the bed, unsure of what he’s supposed to do while she pees. She doesn’t come out when she’s done; she waits the two minutes by herself in the bathroom, and when she comes out she looks radiant but calm. She just smiles and gives him a little nod, and she doesn’t start to cry until he closes the distance between them with a giant bound and kisses the palms of her hands, laughing and shaking.</p><p>But she still doesn’t slow down, and when the first photos of her baby bump come out, all the insanity intensifies tenfold. The paparazzi camp out around the clock outside the wall surrounding their house. When she’s five months along, he <em>begs</em> her, actually kneeling in front of her on the living room rug, to stop chasing after the thing that she thinks will keep her parents alive.</p><p>“Please. You don’t have to do this.”</p><p>“Yes, I do.”</p><p>“It’s <em>your</em> life.”</p><p>“They gave it to me.”</p><p>“Not to do <em>this</em> with it!”</p><p>“You didn’t <em>know</em> them, Ben!” she yells back. “What do you know about what they’d want!?”</p><p>“They wouldn’t want you to kill yourself for them! We could go, just leave all this and move somewhere where they couldn’t find us and we could have a <em>life!”</em></p><p>She’s infuriatingly calm all of a sudden. “I can’t, okay? I can’t stop. This is what I need to do.”</p><p><em>“I</em> NEED YOU! DON’T FUCKING DIE!”</p><p>She comes to him, then, and kneels down with him so he can sob and cling to her and say over and over and over: “Don’t die. Don’t die, okay? Don’t die.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The doctor doesn’t catch it, on the first ultrasound. She finds the tiny squirming bundle of life and lets Rey and Ben see on the monitor, and Rey squeezes his hand so hard that it probably hurts, but he doesn’t complain. He just looks in awe at the monitor and back at her, and back at the monitor and back at her, like it’s impossible to decide which he wants to look at more.</p><p>It’s not until the second ultrasound, when the doctor is maneuvering the lubricated wand around Rey’s still-flat abdomen, that she sees it and tells them. Not <em>a</em> baby. <em>Babies. </em>Twins.</p><p>They’re both terrified, but he’s terrified in an ecstatic way, and she’s just terrified. She starts to dream about speeding cars.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>For a wedding present, Ben’s dad gives them his old acoustic guitar, the one he used to sing Ben to sleep with when he was little. He brings it to the wedding and it’s not wrapped, it just has a clumsily tied bow of ribbon around the old leather neck of the case. It’s really a present for Ben, Rey thinks; she doesn’t play guitar, and this is something between him and his dad. But she still smiles and hugs Han tightly and thanks him from her heart, for giving her a husband.</p><p>When she asks Ben afterward what songs his dad used to sing him, he says gruffly, <em>“Song,</em> not songs. Just ‘Vincent’ by Don McLean.” Rey doesn’t think she knows it, but she doesn’t tell him.</p><p>She listens to it later on her laptop, and of <em>course</em> she knows it.</p><p>
  <em>Starry, starry night</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Paint your palette blue and grey</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Look out on a summer’s day</em>
</p><p>
  <em>With eyes that know the darkness in my soul</em>
</p><p>It’s about Vincent Van Gogh’s suicide. A beautiful song, but not a particularly appropriate lullaby.</p><p>It’s not until the first time Ben takes the guitar out of its case with reverent hands and plays the song for her and her swollen, baby-filled belly that she realizes: it really <em>was</em> a present for her, after all.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s only when she’s too pregnant to hide it with strategic wardrobe choices and prop placement that she has to stop working. There are whole days, now, when she doesn’t have somewhere she has to be. She thinks she might go crazy. The wall that borders the yard is like her prison. Sometimes she sneaks past Ben and grabs her car keys and goes to run some trivial errand that someone else could easily do for her. She trusts in her pregnancy to protect her from the hands of strangers, but the eyes devour her. When she drives back home and pauses at the curb, waiting for the mechanical gate to open, the paparazzi pound on the hood of the car to get her to look at them. She flashes them bright smiles and then drives in and sits in the garage and cries from the strain.</p><p>
  <em>I hope you’re happy. Just look what I’m doing for you.</em>
</p><p>She hates her parents in those moments, but she loves them so much at the same time that her heart aches with it, and she doesn’t know how to do this. How to be a daughter <em>and</em> a wife and soon, a mother. There isn’t enough of her to share between her parents and Ben; how can she fit in two more? She’s spread like butter on dry toast.</p><p>Ben always hears her drive in, and he comes and opens the car door gently so he doesn’t startle her. She sobs <em>I’m sorry, I’m sorry,</em> and he doesn’t answer, he just crouches down and wipes her cheeks with his big thumbs until the tears slow, and then he picks her up underneath her knees and her back and carries her inside. He never complains, even when the babies get so big that she’s full almost to bursting and he huffs and puffs a little as he carries her.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He jolts awake in the middle of the night to the feel of her nudging him.</p><p>“Ben, I think my water broke.”</p><p>He blinks at her a couple times, trying to realize whether this is a dream. It’s not, and he springs into action. He tears around, grabbing the bags they’ve already packed and frantically trying to think of what they could’ve forgotten. It’s only when he pauses a second to breathe that he realizes that she’s trying to strip the bed of the sheets she ruined. He comes up to her softly. “Rey, someone else can do that, hmm? Let’s go to the hospital and have some babies, okay?”</p><p>“No,” she says stubbornly. “I just need to do this, first.”</p><p>He thinks she’s having a contraction; her teeth are gritted and her forehead beads with sweat, but she refuses to acknowledge it. Her hands tug ineffectually at the sheets until he can’t stand it anymore; he dashes around to each of the corners of the bed, yanking the sheets out and piling them in a mountain in the middle of the bed that he sweeps off onto the floor.</p><p>“Okay? Now we can go, okay?”</p><p>She’s shaking her head like she can’t stop. “No, Ben, no, I can’t. Don’t make me, I can’t. Please.”</p><p>He would give her <em>anything, </em>he would lay the <em>world</em> at her feet, but he can’t give her this. So he takes a deep breath, cups her face in his hands, and says, “You are the bravest, strongest, most badass person I’ve ever met in my whole entire life. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after that, but I know that right now, we’re going to go to the hospital and you’re going to push out our babies and then we can figure everything else out, after.”</p><p>She looks up at him and clutches onto his sleeves for reassurance. She whispers, so softly he almost can’t hear it, “What if I die?”</p><p>“I won’t let you. Okay? I won’t let you.”</p><p>She nods tremulously, and he calls the ambulance and the police escort.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The hours blur together. There’s pain and ice chips and moments of lucidity and sometimes a few winks of sleep, but then more pain, over and over until she thinks she’ll die of it. She thinks she’s dying and no one has the heart to tell her.</p><p>Ben holds her hand, and <em>oh,</em> how she wishes her mom were there, to hold her other one. She closes her eyes and gropes for her, until a warm hand takes hers and she thinks maybe she wished hard enough that she willed her into being. She opens her eyes and looks down at the hand. It’s not her mom’s. It’s Ben’s. It’s like the clouds break, finally. <em>She</em> has two hands and so does <em>he,</em> and he can hold both of hers. Together they’re enough, all by themselves.</p><p>She laughs from the sheer joy of it, and she sees the tired confusion in his eyes but he doesn’t have time to ask because the doctor is between her knees telling her to <em>push. </em>She never takes her eyes off of Ben’s as she does.</p><p>When the nurse lays their babies on her chest, she looks down at them and up at him and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt. Her debt to her parents is paid. It’s time for her, now.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Hearth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here's Don McLean's achingly beautiful <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHnRfhDmrk">Vincent</a>.</p><p>Huge thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/StarWarshipper">Jenya</a> for the Canadian authenticity consult. 😊💛</p><p><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erateini">Erateini</a>, I so hope you enjoy this little gift. Thank you again for this prompt. I was surprised by how much it moved me.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>The babies are weighed, swaddled, and laid in rolling bassinets that the nurse leaves next to Rey’s bed with instructions to push the call button if she needs anything.</p><p>She drinks them in: the little eyelashes fluttering in sleep and the tiny rosebud cheeks and the almost-imperceptible wisps of dark hair. <em>Half her, half him.</em> Both have a curled fist escaping the blankets at the neck. Ben hangs over her, stroking her hair.</p><p>She’s made him wait years; she won’t make him wait any longer. She tears her eyes away from the babies, turns to him and asks, “Where should we move?”</p><p>She can see it in his face as it dawns on him, and she revels in it. “Really?” he says gleefully. “Are you sure?”</p><p>Her peaceful certainty hasn’t left. Her smile is quietly luminous when she nods.</p><p>“Anywhere!” he exclaims joyously. “Where do <em>you</em> want to move? Anywhere, Rey, I’ll go anywhere.”</p><p>“Somewhere quiet, and far away. With a lake, maybe.”</p><p>“I’ll get you <em>thirty</em> lakes.”</p><p>She laughs. She’d almost forgotten how laughing feels. “I don’t think we need more than one.”</p><p>He thinks. “Canada?”</p><p>She doesn’t hesitate a second. “Okay.”</p><p>“Okay?” He’s still incredulous.</p><p>“Let’s move to Canada.”</p><p>He doesn’t want to jar her, but she insists, so he wedges his bulk into the hospital bed next to her. Ben wishes they had an atlas; there’s something so romantic about the idea of just opening to a page at random and letting a finger fall. He tells Rey as much, and she takes his phone, opens Google maps, and zooms in haphazardly to Canada. “Close your eyes,” she says, smiling, and he obeys. She takes his hand and guides his pointer finger toward the phone, and when his finger touches the glass and he opens his eyes, they have a new home. He calls a realtor from the hallway before she can change her mind.</p><p>When he comes back in, she’s dozing, her head turned toward the sleeping babies in their bassinets and her fingers curled into her palm just like theirs. He wonders if it’s possible to die of happiness.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>She can’t breastfeed; there’s something defective about her mammary glands. California Rey would’ve been bowled over with guilt. Canada Rey chortles unreservedly in the baby formula aisle of the grocery store as Ben pretends to be a sommelier for her entertainment. “And <em>this</em> is a particularly fine vintage, madam, with subtle notes of milk and a delicately milky aftertaste.”</p><p>No one takes a picture of them. She doesn’t have to glance over her shoulder. They round the corner at the end of the aisle and she doesn’t need to brace herself for photographers. She twines her fingers through Ben’s and when he looks at her and smiles a clear, bright, boyish smile, she thinks her heart might burst.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He expects it to be a challenge to persuade her to hire help.</p><p>One of their nearest neighbors—Bev, a graying fifty-something woman with a simultaneously motherly and no-nonsense air—brings over a casserole and coos over the twins. She clucks at the bags under Rey’s eyes and offers to stay over one night a week so she and Ben can get a full night’s sleep. Ben watches with bated breath from the hallway. Rey accepts almost before Bev can finish talking.</p><p>Before the month is out, they have three regular babysitters, two of whom stay overnight. A man Ben strikes up a conversation with in the hardware store confesses that he was a chef in a past life and misses cooking for people, and soon he’s making half their meals. It’s incongruous: the grizzled mountain man in an apron. The babies’ grasping hands don’t even wrap all the way around his weathered finger.</p><p>A couple of high school girls who want after-school jobs are hired to clean and help out around the house. Ben can tell they’re more than a little star-struck at first, but Rey is gracious, and once they see her with spit-up in her hair, she becomes a real person to them.</p><p>Soon there are eight pairs of arms that the babies are equally comfortable in. And after a lifetime of giving pieces of herself away, Rey starts to let other people give of themselves to her family. Ben can’t find the words to tell her how proud he is of her. He hopes she knows anyway.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>After a while, Rey starts to feel that old frightened feeling creep back and wonders why there haven’t been paparazzi. At least a few should have made the trek for the payday promised by pictures of the babies, if not of her and Ben. He casually asks around in town and Rey pieces together what she hears from Bev, and together they realize why they’ve been safe.</p><p>There’s only one place for visitors to stay in the vicinity: a rarely-occupied motel that’s used almost exclusively to put up overflow family members who come for weddings or funerals. The town isn’t a destination; there’s nothing particular it has to offer that tourists can’t find bigger, better, or more picturesque somewhere else. So when booking calls start coming in from California area codes, the manager is politely sorry to have to inform them that the motel is booked up. <em>Yes, for the foreseeable future. It’s our busy season, eh? Ooh, no, December is no good. Neither is January. Or February. Or March.</em></p><p>Local residents start getting calls and letters expressing interest in renting houses in the area. The would-be renters are highly motivated and willing to offer ample compensation. But somehow there’s not so much as a shed available for rent. Even the miserly old Gord McDonough, who has three vacant outbuildings and never passes up a chance to make a buck, replies to the inquiries with a cordial invitation for the callers to go piss in the lake.</p><p>It’s not in so many words, but Rey and Ben get the message: their neighbors have accepted them. And woe betide the outsider who would intrude on one of their own.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They name the twins Letty and Rob. There’s no particular significance, no family history. They just like the names, and when they meet their babies, they know: this is a Letty, and this is a Rob.</p><p>The dread and bitterness of so much of Rey’s pregnancy don’t have any lingering effects on the twins; if anything, they’re exceptionally happy, easy babies. Letty is the more adventurous of the two, the first to crawl and to pull herself up to stand on her chubby baby legs. Rob is content to stay where he’s put. He’ll sit on a lap for hours to be read to, while Letty starts to squirm after the first couple pages. Both of them are unfailingly mesmerized, though, when Ben takes out his guitar.</p><p>When they first move, Rey wants to make one of the spare bedrooms into a recording studio so Ben can keep making music. She lives in private fear that her choice to move stripped him of his own career, and that he’ll grow over time to resent her for it. But he tells her he doesn’t care about recording; he won’t stop making music, but what more audience could he possibly need than her and the twins?</p><p>She’s not sure she believes him, until one afternoon when the babies are big enough to sit up on their own and he takes Han’s old guitar out as they’re playing on a blanket in the sunroom. From the first chord, the twins are transfixed, as always. They sit and gawk up at him like he hung the moon. He plays ‘Vincent,’ of course. And she finally believes him, that he doesn’t want for anything other than the four round brown eyes gaping in wonder.</p><p>
  <em>Now I understand</em>
</p><p>
  <em>What you tried to say to me</em>
</p><p>Rey understands.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“I found a therapist, forty minutes away,” she tells him apropos of nothing over breakfast one morning after Letty wakes them up early. “I’m thinking of meeting with her.”</p><p>Ben looks up from feeding Letty, and when the airplane spoon halts its progress toward her mouth she squawks her displeasure. “Oh yeah?”</p><p>“Yeah.” Rey takes a sip of tea and looks out the bay window toward the lake, where the sun’s rays are cresting the horizon through the trees. Ben completes the plane’s flight, then wipes the edge of Letty’s mouth where the stewed pumpkin dribbles out. She tries out her wobbly new grin, and it’s orange.</p><p>His eyes film over. “That’s...really good, Rey.”</p><p>“Yeah.” She sips her tea.</p><p>The sun rises.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They buy board games, because that’s a thing a family should have. Some nights after the twins are asleep, the two of them sit on the rug by the fireplace in the family room and play Scrabble or Monopoly or Sorry. Ben pretends to be a sore loser to make her yelp in delighted feigned outrage. Half the time, the game ends with him flipping the board in mock frustration. She tackles him in revenge, and they playfully wrestle until he lets her pin him, panting, on the fluffy rug. It’s only then that she relents and kisses him, sometimes full on the mouth but sometimes chaste pecks on the nose or the forehead, teasing him until he growls and flips them both over so he has the upper hand. He kisses her properly, then, and slowly makes love to her in their house by their lake on their rug on their hearth.</p><p>Her face in the firelight is magic when he slides inside her. Suspended in that moment, he thinks of all the Reys and Bens in alternate timelines. The one where she forever refused to marry him. The one where she died after all in that car crash like she feared. The one where she never got pregnant. The one where she didn’t leave Hollywood. He would’ve been grateful to be any one of those Bens, just to get to be with her for any length of time in any way that she and fate allowed.</p><p>But as he exhales and starts to move inside her, looking down at the love-light shining in her eyes, he knows that of all those Bens in all those alternate universes, he’s the luckiest one. It’s not even close.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>For the first time in her life, Rey starts going for runs outdoors, not in a basement gym on a treadmill. She buys a running stroller and takes the babies along sometimes. She can wear ratty old workout clothes and sweat through them and not have to worry about looking presentable. And if the physical exertion sometimes loosens up feelings that she wasn’t prepared for, she can stop by the side of the road and cry. The trees and the babies don’t mind.</p><p>She didn’t realize how much <em>work</em> going to therapy would be, how much it would take out of her to talk about even little things like how much she craved her mom’s affection. How furious she is with her dad. The delicate blue tinge of her mom’s skin when she found her dead. The ways she wants to be different from them as a parent.</p><p>After a while her therapist helps her give herself permission to tell Ben these things, too. She knows it wounds him to hear her hurts—sometimes more than it hurts her to have them. But he reassures her again and again that he would infinitely rather hear these things than not, if it makes her feel at all better to have told him. He thanks her for her confidences, with gratitude that runs deeper than words.</p><p>So she pulls out heavy drawers in her heart that she closed and locked a long time ago, and shows him the things inside. Some of them she throws away, and others she keeps, but now stored in Tupperware. So the light can get in.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This story really burrowed under my skin in a way I didn’t expect when I started writing it. I hope some part of it touches you. ❤️</p><p>I'm on <a href="https://twitter.com/CeliaAnd2">Twitter</a>.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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